Have you tried writing technical reports in Word? It's a nightmare. Word's numbering and reference functionality, not to mention its citation functions are way worse than what you can achieve with TeX. Cooperating on writing the same document with many people? Yeah, forget about it. One guy has Mac OS with one Word version and then you have three others with different combinations of Windows/Word, and the whole thing implodes in a cascade of formatting glitches.
Also, I'd say that if you can't write your technical report in LaTeX because LaTeX is too hard, let's go shopping (in the Microsoft App Store), then maybe you shouldn't be writing a technical report.
Not to mention that nobody has to write an ounce of LaTeX since the advent of pandoc.
When you make a syntax error (missing closing brace, forgot to escape that underscore, etc), what's the probability that the latex error message will be at all relevant to the source of the error? It's pretty damn low. In my experience, debugging LaTeX is anything but easy.
Word may make it easier to half-ass something. But its error reporting is way worse than LaTeX's — it doesn't have any. If something's fucked up, it's fucked up, and good luck finding out what you did wrong. Writing a consistently styled, readable and good looking document in Word is anything but easy.
So we're back to square one: typesetting a document is hard, and there is no software solution that makes it easy (for simple stuff, pandoc comes close.) You'll have to learn to do it.
Like any complex program there are things to learn and quirks to get used to, but it can be a very powerful platform once you get past that.
edits: typos.
Had I written it in word I would have tossed the disk into the trash, and watched a movie.
LaTeX, the gift that keeps on giving.
But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex!
With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count).
Use the best tool for any given job.
Oftentimes, I can (correctly) correlate "weird" looking documents with MS Word or Open/LibreOffice, eg: when reading papers. It's a surprising subconscious estimate and I don't know what throws my sensibilities off! Maybe I'm used to a higher standard of typesetting, or maybe it's just that I'm used to reading LaTeX output. I have heard the same from multiple academics who have spent some years looking at LaTeX output.
I wouldn't be surprised if people spent more time looking at beautiful documents, compared to uglier counterparts. Just like any other UX. As always, the document creator has to decide whether it's worth the extra effort.
http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/435x597x...
OTOH: for many business cases where text is kept sparse and randomly placed PowerPoint excels. And new versions have somewhat taken Tufte's criticism to heart -- the smart, make-a-diagram-for-text enable a lot of conceptual collaboration across a widely multidisciplinar organization. I mean, sometimes you're writing documentation for your fellow nerds (i.e. the equations behind some code you wrote) and sometimes you're explaining economic concepts to lawyers.
(I think (we) nerds tend to undervalue the work and insights of people like lawyers and accountants; and the importance of clear communication. But I digress on a digression...)
"LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text, made more typesetting, grammatical, and formatting errors"
Notice of Republication
This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of the figures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the original layout errors. Please download this article again to view the corrected version. The originally published, uncorrected article and the republished, corrected article are provided here for reference.
Agh, I keep on making the mistake of doing homework directly to LaTeX. It seems that you're able to think directly from the page but it ultimately slows you down. I know way too much about mathematical typesetting as it is -- before I start making up rules about how Expectation should be \mathsf{E} and writing huge custom command files.
This one exam I started doing all the exercises in the book into LaTeX. As an aspiring mathematician, I need to learn to better appreciate pencil and paper.
The average user of course doesn't even know what the difference between a text editor and MS Word is but I'd argue that it's not much harder to learn using something like LyX than learning Word. Word only wins because of peer pressure. Almost all offices use MS Office, so you're expected to use that, even for documents where simple Markdown would be completely sufficient.
Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else.
My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails, and the fact you have to compile the same file $magic times in a row to get a stable render.
You should look into LatexMk[0].
Oh, that's so true. I've spend far to many hours trying to help debug LaTeX code from friends and coworkers.
I'd give Office users that MS Office is easier to use if you want to write one page of plain text without anything else but above that Office is just a huge pain in the a... But the biggest problem I have with Office isn't whether it's hard to use or not but that the text it produces is simply ugly. Especially so if you have to work between different versions of MS Office and maybe even an OO user within the loop. (That would than probably be me...) The text layout MS Office produces is simply hideous.
There are shittons of templates.
The error messages suck though, that's true.
EDIT: nevermind, I didn't know Latexmk is a thing and is popular.
I now use rubber[0] to avoid this. I especially like that it has a --clean option :)
I spend hours trying to fix bugs for my master dissertation and gave up with two unfixed problems: (1) missing line breaking in references containing accentuated characters and (2) including some non BMP code-point character.
And some package can mess up with some other packages so coming with a solution can sometime break another thing.
Yes, it is. That's like saying I prefer bash because it's the same on all platform as opposed to windows proprietary UI.
Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user.